Cartwright Reed

second day at the CES - postscript

As I was leaving the BlogHaus, I had a chance to meet Robert Scobel, the tech überblogger. Today, Google and FaceBook decided to work together to establish a standard for data portability - precipitated by Scobel's attempt to scrape information from his Facebook account, his subsequent ejection from the FaceBook community, and, after a lot of negative publicity, his return to the FaceBook community (Scobel's side of the story here).

If Google and FaceBook agree on data portability standards, it should have a powerful effect on the way digital commercial media content is viewed as well as user generated content. It'll be the most important thing that happened during CES!

Second day at the CES - blogger conversations

Reporting in from the BlogHaus at the Bellagio, courtesy PodTech and Seagate. In between business meetings, I'm spending some time talking to bloggers to get a better idea of what we can do to make the iofy audiobook player a good podcasting player as well. I'm very happy with the software that our development team has created to make listening to an audiobook a simple and pleasurable experience. Now we need to do the same thing for podcasting and video blogs with an audio track.

Yesterday and today, I've talked to bloggers about the differences between regular blogging and multimedia blogging. I had a chance to talk to bloggers with a tight focus - like tablet PCs, storage devices or technology and driving - as well as bloggers that are part of multi-topic blogging teams like Microsoft's Channel 9.

In general, people agreed that podcasting and video blogging are not following the same path as regular blogging. First, multimedia blogging audiences are much smaller, and second, making compelling audio and video content is a lot harder.

Multimedia bloggers were frustrated by the success of text-only blogs. General agreement was that it was much harder to get people to commit to watch a video blog or listen to a podcast unless they were doing something else - typically driving or exercising, just like audiobooks.